The deadly effects of gambling...thanks to mobile apps, bookies have never been richer and addiction has never been easier

The Arsenal footballer Paul Merson – one of the club’s most famous and popular players, who also appeared for England – was once so fearful of relapsing into his gambling addiction that he considered breaking his own fingers.

‘Then I couldn’t pick up the phone to dial the bookies. Job done. I had a picture in my head of getting a hammer and doing the fingers on my right hand, one by one.’

It’s a sign of the desperation to which even the best-paid people can be reduced by their love of a bet, a love that can eat through bank balances, jobs, relationships, even the will to live.

The academic Darragh McGee argues that sport’s relationship with gambling has, in the era of the smartphone, reached levels so dangerous that action now needs to be taken. Does his case hold up?

Gambling, he’s happy to admit, is as old as mankind. Archaeologists have discovered dice dating from 6,000BC, made from the knucklebones of cattle and sheep.

Sport being corrupted is nothing new either: in the Olympic Games of 388BC, the boxer Eupolos of Thessaly was convicted of bribing three opponents to throw fights.

Ruination has always lurked. In 1720, the Duke of Wharton lost £13,000 (£3 million today) in one day at Newmarket horse racing. A 1731 cricket match on Chelsea Common was abandoned after a mass brawl over a disputed wager.

There’s an equally long tradition of the authorities trying to take action.

The Gaming Act of 1664 made debts of over £100 unenforceable, and well into the 20th century the industry was frowned upon.

Even when betting shops were legalised in 1960 they had to have blacked-out store fronts, and it wasn’t until 1986 that they were allowed to show live televised sport.

To try to gain legitimacy, bookmakers took to calling themselves ‘turf accountants’. When Stewart Kenny (one of the founders of betting company Paddy Power) became a bookie at 21, ‘people were coming up to sympathise with my mum’.

But the problem really started, says McGee, with the arrival of the internet. The first online bet was made in 1996: a Finnish man staked $50 on Tottenham Hotspur to beat lowly Hereford United in the FA Cup, at such short odds that he won just $2.

The arrangements for the bet gave a taste of what was to come – the betting firm was Austrian, but was licensed in Antigua. The web meant that physical boundaries had lost their power, as had politicians based within those boundaries.

Victor Chandler was the first British bookmaker to realise this. In 1999, he moved his operation from London to Gibraltar, to escape the 9 per cent tax that the British government imposed on every bet. The government offices there didn’t even have a computer, so Chandler’s licence was printed on one owned by the finance minister’s daughter.

Soon Coral, Ladbrokes and William Hill had moved to Gibraltar, too, one firm transferring so many staff that they bought an old hotel in which to house them.

Placing a bet has been revolutionised by technology. No more stubby pencils in backstreet bookies – now the temptation is there in your hand, first with your TV remote control (pioneered by Sky in 2004), then with your phone.

It has powered huge growth for online betting companies such as Betfair, started by Andrew Black and funded by Ed Wray, who ‘literally bet on Black’.

The founder of Bet365, Denise Coates, paid herself in just one year (2020) the small matter of £421 million – more than the salaries of all the FTSE 100 bosses combined.

The firms’ tactics are designed to draw you in. In the old days you picked a winning team, and possibly a scoreline, placed your bet and waited for the end of the match.

Now options like ‘cashing out’, where the company offers you some, but not all, of your winnings if you take them early, keep you glued to your phone for the full 90 minutes.

Deals aren’t always what they seem: one company offered Paris St Germain at 50-1 in the 2025 Champions League final, incredible odds in any two-horse race, never mind one in which PSG were overwhelming favourites.

But you had to be a new customer (which meant signing up and registering your bank details), your stake was capped at £1, and the cash payout was only at PSG’s normal odds of 13-8 on (i.e. 62p).

The rest was given in free bets, which you had to use within ten days, tempting you into developing a gambling habit.

There are certainly case studies in this book that are hard to read. Leicester City fan Alice once found herself wanting her team to concede a goal – she had bet on them to win 4-2, but the score was 4-1.

Like a lot of customers she started betting on football but moved across to online casinos, even gambling during her commute to work: ‘Anytime I hit traffic, or got stuck at the lights, I’d get a quick spin in.’

She eventually lost her £35,000 life savings.

Meanwhile, James Grimes was ‘regularly setting my alarm for 3am to bet on Vietnamese football and crying myself to sleep when I lost’.

He went through a £25,000 inheritance from his grandmother, as ‘it was easier to lose money and feel the pain of that rather than process the grief’.

On a trip to Las Vegas, he went straight to Caesars Palace, sat at a slot machine for eight hours and lost nearly $4,000.

‘I came out like a zombie, facing five days of rationing the few dollars I had left . . . I walked the casinos each day hoping someone would have left behind some coins in the tray.’

Such tales, as well as the Public Health England estimate in 2021 that there are 409 gambling-related suicides each year, certainly show the dangers.

Few would argue against there being safeguards, and help for those who need it. But I can’t help feeling that McGee overstates the case when he claims sport has been ‘hijacked’ by gambling, ‘denaturing our relationship with the clubs and athletes we have long cherished and championed’.

My friends and I discuss cricket and football with just as much enthusiasm as we always did, and few of us ever place a bet. Most people, I suspect, are the same. The risk of tighter regulation is that it won’t stop those who are determined to bet more than they can afford, but it will make life prohibitively difficult for those who just want a bit of fun.

Horse racing is facing an uncertain future because of proposed ‘affordability checks’. A prospective punter who has to provide his payslip is going to walk away, with knock-on effects for the whole industry and everyone who works in it – as well as for Rachel Reeves and her tax collectors.

As so often, the authorities’ desire to stop people doing what they want could prove a very big gamble indeed.